The Ireland of Brian Friel
The violent conflict that reshaped Ireland in the early 20th century — and that lingers in Brian Friel’s work
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company February 1 through March 3, 2024, Brian Friel’s masterpiece Faith Healer is the story of an Irish itinerant healer, his Northern Irish partner, and their English manager. While their struggle to tend to one another is deeply personal and profoundly human, it sits in the context of the long tensions between their three nations. Friel is a playwright who was always, on some level, writing about his home countries and the permeable yet intractable borders between them.
Friel (born in 1929) and his Faith Healer characters (probably born in the 1910s) grew up on either side of war — not just the world wars of the 20th century, but perhaps more importantly the long simmering war between the Irish and Great Britain. Faith Healer was first produced in 1979, but it appears to be set sometime in the 1960s and concerns events from decades earlier. The generation of Irish and British people born in the 1910s and 1920s were steeped in the Irish-British conflict, including the era of the Troubles beginning in the late 1960s.
After 800 years of English invasion and colonization — and repeated uprisings that were brutally suppressed — 1916 was a watershed year for the Irish nationalist cause, which supported a free Ireland unrestrained by British rule. The Easter Uprising of that year in Dublin lasted a week, capturing several government buildings and involving more than 1,000 Irish people. When the British finally and violently put down the rebellion and executed most of its leaders, the rebels became a rallying cry for the cause, turning the tide of public sentiment dramatically and swiftly.
In 1918, members of Sinn Féin, the Irish nationalist party, won the majority of Irish seats in the British Parliament. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was formed in 1919, and the War of Irish Independence officially began that year. With no standing army to fight with, the IRA employed guerrilla tactics, bombings, and street fights against their better supplied and trained enemy.
But “war” was itself a fraught term. While the Irish certainly considered it war, the British government treated the conflict more as a police action to avoid legitimizing the revolution. To that end, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) — the police force, which was under British control — was tasked with much of the fighting, and were therefore targeted by the IRA. To that end, they recruited men, largely British World War I vets, to join the RIC and bolster its ranks. These recruits, often called Black and Tans because of their ad hoc uniforms, were not beholden to the same codes of conduct or training as proper RIC officers — many of whom were Irish people with strong ties to their community who may themselves have been Irish nationalists. Many RIC officers abhorred the tactics of the Black and Tans, which included indiscriminate violence, burning of homes and villages, and outsized retribution against civilians for acts committed by the IRA.
But despite the terror the Black and Tans instilled, the guerrilla war effort was undeterred, and in 1921 England admitted that it could not defeat the IRA militarily. With approximately 2,300 people dead — including about 900 civilians — a truce was called. The resulting treaty created the Irish Free State, an independent nation. But there were two major catches: one was that Ireland would remain a dominion country of Great Britain, though it was independent, and the other was that six northern counties would become Northern Ireland and remain part of Great Britain. This truce would cease violence between Ireland and England, but spark more amongst the Irish themselves.
One faction of the victorious Irish nationalist forces believed that while the treaty was not everything they hoped for, it was a good start and offered them the best chance of eventually gaining total independence. The other side rejected the compromises, arguing that Ireland would never be free under these terms. Former friends and comrades in arms turned on one another, and a two-year civil war raged until 1923, featuring many of the same guerrilla tactics and street fights that characterized the War of Independence. But now, rather than a struggle between the oppressed and the oppressors, it was brother against brother.
The pro-treaty Provisional Government eventually won the conflict, but not before another 1,200 people had died. And the anti-treaty side did eventually get what it wanted: in 1937 a new Irish constitution was drafted, which declared further independence from Great Britain, and in 1948 the British Parliament officially renounced all claims to the Republic of Ireland.
But Northern Ireland was another story. While the citizens of the Republic of Ireland were predominantly Catholic, with indigenous ties to Ireland, the majority of Northern Ireland was Protestant, with roots tied more closely to the British. As such, the predominantly Catholic unionists wanted the six northern counties to become part of the republic, while the majority-Protestant loyalists wished to remain part of Great Britain. The loyalist government of Northern Ireland discriminated against the Catholic population, keeping them out of the best jobs, housing, and educational institutions. While the conflict that would become the violent Troubles of the late 1960s through the 1990s is often framed as a religious struggle, the religions are shorthand for a political and economic divide in Northern Ireland that dates back centuries between the those loyal to the British crown and those who felt displaced and oppressed over 800 years of colonization.
This tension around identity — around Irishness and Englishness, between the romanticized past and the industrialized future — is present throughout Brian Friel’s work, including Faith Healer. It makes sense; beyond his deep perceptivity about human nature and Ireland as a whole, he himself was born into a kind of borderland. He was born to Catholic parents in Northern Ireland, but spent much of his time in Donegal, a county of the Republic that is geographically in the north, connected to Northern Ireland by a long land border but cut off from it politically and economically. Friel was born after the Civil War but into the decades of roiling tension and barely contained violence that would explode into the Troubles in his adulthood. In answer, he and actor Stephen Rea formed Field Day Theatre Company in 1980 in order to produce one of Friel’s most direct explorations of the English presence in and remaking of Ireland, Translations. Field Day aimed to create a “fifth province” in Ireland — a Northern Irish company that created space for unity and wholeness among Ireland’s disparate identities. Inside and outside of that company, Friel’s plays often contain the push and pull of people caught between identities and borders, unsure of who they are and who they have the potential to be.
In Faith Healer, Friel never directly addresses the political and social conflict, but he gives us a man from the Republic who is despairingly ambivalent about what “home” looks like to him, a woman from a respectable and prosperous Northern Irish Protestant family who throws it all away, and an Englishman who makes his life with them in derelict venues and an old van. They want desperately to come together, to be each other’s solace, but they can never bridge the divides that hold them apart — reminiscent of a people who would spend years killing each other for the goal of unity.
More great reading: See other recent articles and interviews on the Lantern Searchlight blog
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Faith Healer by Brian Friel is onstage February 1 through March 3, 2024, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
